http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0602/feature2/index.html
Scientists say that the brain chemistry of infatuation is akin to
mental illnesswhich gives new meaning to "madly in love."
Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.
In the Western world we have for centuries concocted poems and stories and
plays about the cycles of love, the way it morphs and changes over time, the
way passion grabs us by our flung-back throats and then leaves us for something
saner. If Draculathe frail woman, the sensuality of submissionreflects how we
understand the passion of early romance, the Flintstones reflects our
experiences of long-term love: All is gravel and somewhat silly, the song so
familiar you can't stop singing it, and when you do, the emptiness is almost
unbearable.
We have relied on stories to explain the complexities of love, tales of jealous
gods and arrows. Now, however, these storiesso much a part of every
civilizationmay be changing as science steps in to explain what we have always
felt to be myth, to be magic. For the first time, new research has begun to
illuminate where love lies in the brain, the particulars of its chemical
components.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher may be the closest we've ever come to having a
doyenne of desire. At 60 she exudes a sexy confidence, with corn-colored hair,
soft as floss, and a willowy build. A professor at Rutgers University, she
lives in New York City, her book-lined apartment near Central Park, with its
green trees fluffed out in the summer season, its paths crowded with couples
holding hands.
Fisher has devoted much of her career to studying the biochemical pathways of
love in all its manifestations: lust, romance, attachment, the way they wax and
wane. One leg casually crossed over the other, ice clinking in her glass, she
speaks with appealing frankness, discussing the ups and downs of love the way
most people talk about real estate. "A woman unconsciously uses orgasms as a
way of deciding whether or not a man is good for her. If he's impatient and
rough, and she doesn't have the orgasm, she may instinctively feel he's less
likely to be a good husband and father. Scientists think the fickle female
orgasm may have evolved to help women distinguish Mr. Right from Mr. Wrong."
One of Fisher's central pursuits in the past decade has been looking at love,
quite literally, with the aid of an MRI machine. Fisher and her colleagues
Arthur Aron and Lucy Brown recruited subjects who had been "madly in love" for
an average of seven months. Once inside the MRI machine, subjects were shown
two photographs, one neutral, the other of their loved one.
What Fisher saw fascinated her. When each subject looked at his or her loved
one, the parts of the brain linked to reward and pleasurethe ventral tegmental
area and the caudate nucleuslit up. What excited Fisher most was not so much
finding a location, an address, for love as tracing its specific chemical
pathways. Love lights up the caudate nucleus because it is home to a dense
spread of receptors for a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which Fisher came
to think of as part of our own endogenous love potion. In the right
proportions, dopamine creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention,
and motivation to win rewards. It is why, when you are newly in love, you can
stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope
ordinarily too steep for your skill. Love makes you bold, makes you bright,
makes you run real risks, which you sometimes survive, and sometimes you don't.
Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.
Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
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